I'm SO HAPPY we're having a September release of ArcheAge. I'm ready to play for real. Open Beta starts on Thurs Sept 4th. I'll still be on but not playing much now that launch is so very close. Yeah, I know I said that before but I mean it this time. There's zero point in continuing to progress.
My character, Alysianah, is on the Alpha server. If anyone tries out OB and there's room on Alpha look me up. Can give you a ship tour, port you to different places, make you some food, etc. Don't let the PVP scare you away from at least trying a really solid fantasy MMO.
In a game that supports nonconsensual PVP, it’s good to have a justice system. It may not help you sleep better after being ganked for you hard earned wares. However, reading trial chat is an endless form of amusement. We already have infamous players (Chalupa) and guilds (Darks Ascension) on the Alpha server.
Crime and Punishment
Crime points are accumulated by participating in unsavory actives such as killing players from your own faction (PK). I spit on such dirty bastards. As well as stealing crops planted by other players. Granted, the only way to steal someone’s crops is if they are illegally planted – not on property they own. We call these illegal farms, which happen routinely but it’s still a crime to take their stuff. I have mixed feelings on this one. Regardless, that’s the law in ArcheAge.
Once a player accumulates 50 crime points, they are flagged in the system as an outlaw. The next time they die by the hand of another player, they are whisked off to court to stand trial. And I mean literally TAKEN INTO CUSTODY. I love the jury system for its worth and in equal measure, its hilarity.
Jury of Your Peers
The accused is resurrected in the courthouse of their faction capital. A jury is formed, including the selection of a judge, from the population of players who have completed the necessary quest. Everyone is physically transported to the courthouse. Jurors can take a seat in the juror’s box, the judge has his desk with a gavel and the accused is at the podium. There are extra chairs for people who want to witness the trial or just hangout.
Players in the Jury Box - Me during my first trial which was quite some time ago
After reviewing the components necessary to upgrade my armor to Conqueror’s and beyond, I decided to use the cloth version gifted to me by our guild leader Fannel. For an alpha character it wasn't worth the cost and effort to upgrade from Artisan's to the Conqueror's, let alone beyond that.
Of the available roles as a Paladin, my preference in a group setting is to heal. In ArcheAge, all classes can wear every armor type. However, cloth provides better stats for healing roles. You can augment your armor with gem slots but you’d still be behind the curve compared to someone in cloth using the exact class build.
The difficulty with this choice is that my offensive skills are all melee. To compensate, I tried swapping out Battlerage (melee) to each of the ranged classes. Unfortunately, I didn’t like any of them. Not even adding the popular Auramancy into the mix made me like anything as well as the Paladin. Grrr! If this was purely a PVE game I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m not actively doing quest content and have no need to kill many mobs on my own. However, ArcheAge’s nonconsensual PVP makes roaming around gimped unwise. Especially since my largest property is in a PVP zone.
The Fix
As I was considering my options one of our guild members, Killset, offered a solution. He linked me the level 50 purple set he was wearing. The stats were much better than mine all the way around and would allow me to obtain plate for when I wasn’t healing. A quick Google search returned a Reddit thread that contained information on where to find the quest starters.
Wow, that went by in the blink of an eye. I started playing the ArcheAge Alpha on July 20th. I hit the current max level without even trying. That said, I have put in an awful amount of hours. Around level 10 or so, I left the theme park rails behind to strike out on my own and fell in MMO love with AA. I’m very pleased with the outcome. If this weren’t an Alpha, I’d be considering an alt in order to try a pure caster class and experience another racial zone. But since it is, that will have to wait.
I’m done progressing
I fed my chickens, covered their trusting little eyes and sang them a soothing melody, as I chopped off their heads. I’m done with the micromanagement of running a farm until release. I enjoyed it. I like the “doing” part of crafting whether it’s harvesting or processing raw materials. However, I need a reason to do it. I think I’ve experienced enough without amassing more for the good ole wipe button that will be pressed before release. Crafting the top tier armor is too time intensive for me to care about acquiring it before its OFFICIALLY MINE, all mine. *Oh, my precious*
I’m turning to more passive means of income – growing longer gestation items as sellable crafting resources versus me crafting items myself. I’m also trying out different class builds that can work with the gear I have at hand – Conqueror’s Ocean set (cloth).
Now that I’m 50, I can also do higher level content with the guild. Last night I participated in farming Library, an instance people use to get materials needed to craft top tier weapons. We also made a run at Howling Abyss, a level 40 to 50 dungeon. Hrm, we had good success. We made it to the final boss with relative ease but couldn’t close the deal. I think we wiped four times before calling it a night. It was late when we started. By 11:30 PM, we’d taken all the beatings would could tolerate for the evening. We’ll probably give it another run over the weekend.
Doing Whatever
I should stop playing until release but I don’t see that happening. AA keeps calling my name. I’ll likely do more exploration, give fishing and cooking a whirl and try my hand at more serious treasure hunting. All of the pictures in this post were taken while swimming around in my diving gear looking for treasure and islands to explore. All of the buildings shown are pockets of player owned housing - little villages and communities. I adore that about AA's housing not being instanced.
I may do some arenas but I can’t play the build I prefer because I’m not willing to put in the effort to upgrade my plate to level 50 at this juncture. That being the case, I may just stick to doing open world PVP when guild members are going. We’ll see. I’ll just take it as it comes from here on out. There’s a lot more that I’m interested in doing once the game is live.
Let's Hit Level 50 (this post is a couple of days old now. I've already hit level 50)
I’m level 48 now and figured I might as well get to 50 since the release seems to be a couple of months away at the least. I was hoping that the date posted on Steam for a mid-September would be confirmed by Trion but no such luck. Much too high of a level to pick up where I had previously stopped questing in my early 20s, I rode out to Halcyona to see if there were any quests there worth my time.
When I first arrived there wasn’t any PVP going on although it’s a PVP zone. Halcyona also has a timed war event to encourage players from the opposing factions to engage. The event is a concentrated version of tower defense. The zone goes into a state of war for an hour. However, the quest and tower defense/capture portion only last around 30 minutes.
My First World PVP Event
I happened to be in Halcyona checking quest rewards and levels, as well as picking up teleport points when it went into war. Members of our guild regularly do the event and since I was out there this time, and the first time they’d seen me out there, they asked me if I wanted to go with them and I did.
I followed Fannel to a quest-giver then off to our defense point. Hmm, not a lot of action happened there. The eastern faction didn’t seem to have enough players to form an assault team and simultaneously defend their node. That being the case, a bunch of us rode out to go on offense.
Just a stone’s throw from level 50, I should be saving every copper toward crafting my Conquerors plate armor set. Meh, that behavior sounds much too practical for being in an Alpha! I was processing hide into leather when I noticed the recipe for crafting Bakehan’s Swimfins. Hmm, I thought, I have the expertise points to make those. That jogged my memory about having seen pictures of players wearing dive helmets. A quick search of my metalwork recipes showed that I could craft that too. That’s all she wrote, I was off and running toward a new adventure!
Ouch
I had 75% of the crafting components needed to make the diving helmet and the fins. Unfortunately, one the items is the same one needed to craft upper level gear. Consequently, what I didn’t have was going to cost me a fair amount of gold – 80G to be exact. Ouch! But what’s an Alpha for if not to experiment, goof around and have fun? Oh yeah, and test stuff. Suuure.
Hrm, what’s going on down here?
After crafting my fins and helmet, I set out off the coast of Two Crowns just to see what I’d see, underneath the sea. It was a bit murky until I remembered lowering the water effects to minimum quality during the recent lag issues. A quick adjustment and ah, that’s better.
I swam around for a little while but didn’t see very much. I guess I was subconsciously hoping for GW2 under water level of content. But to be fair, that’s not a realistic expectation as they’ve never implied it. Still with these sorts of items available for crafting, including a submarine, there must be something under here worth seeing. A quick ask in guild voice chat and I had a volunteer to take me treasure hunting. Woot!
Brokenwind picked me up in his clipper to go treasure hunting
Sunken Treasure
Brokenwind, a guild cohort you’ve seen mentioned here before, took me out in his clipper to look for sunken treasure. We sailed much further out than I would have thought or dared to go alone. We headed deep into PVP waters, where enemy players and pirates aren’t the only baddies you encounter. *shudder*
His boat and I had several encounters with deadly Jellyfish. Ya know, the elite flavor of formerly innocuous creatures devs love putting in games to harass and scare the bejesus out of you. I was like honey to a bee, attracting their agro from a far and chased forever. Grr! Luckily as a Paladin I could heal myself, pop damage barriers and keep swimming while Broken tried to distract the nasty beasts. After a few of those encounters we were able to dive deep under the sea looking for treasure.
We find a shipwreck but no treasure yet
The combination of my helmet, fins and diving tanks from Borken’s ship, we were able to stay underwater a good amount of time. Once we weren’t being chased, it wasn’t long before we found our first treasure chest. After you find one you have to use the interaction available to release it to the surface. Too cute!! The chest floats to the surface using balloons and then you open it hoping for lots of goodies.
Ah ha! Treasure at last. One of five we found during our exploration
Not rich but worth it
In about a 30 minute time span, we found 5 treasure chests that we alternated opening for booty. All told what I claimed netted me a little over 8G. Broken made out with just over 6G. I’ve heard that there are chests out there worth 40G in a single pop. It would sure be nice to run across one of those.
All in all, it was worth the money I invested in crafting the two pieces. I will definitely go out again looking for sunken treasure. I’ll even brave it alone. What’s the worst that can happen? *smile*
Now I have to add crafting a submarine to my other end game goals for the live version. That goes along side having the multistory Stone Manor house that looks like a mini castle. If you’re a fan of the original Highlander movie, it looks like the one he lived in with his wife. I am a fan and that house is on my “must have” list after I’ve secured what I need for normal trade and commerce production.
Good stuff. Fun stuff. The variety of activities is what I enjoy most about ArcheAge. And to think, I haven’t seen hardly any of the PVE content yet. Haven’t visited a single dungeon. Even if the PVE is only marginally good, it’s still another whole layer of things to do and experience. COUNT ME IN!!
Last night our guild joined the “we have a farm wagon” club. Fannel, Brokenwind and I were online pissing and moaning about our inability to grow the stupidly random thunderstruck trees needed to craft one.
Your Guess is as Good as Mine
No one knows for certain the circumstances that cause a tree to be “hit by lightning. There are lots of theories but the rarity of the occurrence makes it nearly impossible to know for sure. Our guild has planted illegal tree farms consisting of hundreds of trees, without producing a single one. Others have done 1K plus trees and have come up empty too.
It's a Big Deal
Farm wagons and merchants ships are the only vehicles capable of storing multiple trade packs for transport, each having slots where trade packs can be placed. Having placement racks allows you to carry more trade packs than you have bodies, greatly reducing the effort needed to move your goods. Both of these vehicles require two thunderstruck trees which because of the rarity and demand, are going for 1.3K gold each and up. 1K gold, honestly earned in game, is A LOT OF MONEY in AA. The construction also requires other relatively high cost components as well.
I believe my previous posts have established that because of the nonconsensual PVP, ArcheAge isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Yes, you can level to max and hardly ever encounter PVP if you forgo seeing all of the content and focus on commerce in non-PVP enabled zones. However, game design makes it such that you may still be impacted financially, even when you escape direct combat.
Over the weekend a guild from the eastern continent successfully defeated the guild who had constructed the castle in Calmlands. Each region can only have a single castle and the owners of that castle control the property tax rates for that area. Nui World Order controlled the one in Calmlands, where I have my 16x16 house and farm.
I won’t go into the detail of the mechanics other than to say, it’s EVE like, in that a formal declaration is executed and a specific date and time for the encountered is provided. The region around the castle becomes a “war zone” and only players from the two guilds are allowed in the area. If you have property there too bad, you can’t access it during the actual encounter. They keep the immediate area clear of bystanders. If you’re not a direct participant in the conflict you receive a debuff that kills you.
Based on the live stream I watched of the encounter on Twitch, NWO was not prepared for what came knocking on their door. They appeared overwhelmed in a short period of time and weren’t able to make any headway in pushing back the invaders. Losing a castle amounts to a minimum of losing 3.5K in gold on the low side, for the construction alone. This doesn’t count upgrades they may have made or the lost property tax revenue.
I've played more than enough of AA to confirm that I'll be playing at launch. I've achieved most of what I wanted to try out during Alpha. I've certainly played more than I have during a pre-release for any other MMO.
I still have plenty to look forward to at launch. I've done so little of the quest content and haven't stepped foot in a single dungeon. I did some healing in a max level PVP zone while guild members were farming XP, leveling alternative skills sets and unique drops. No one engaged enemy faction while we were at it. It reminded me of the impromptu detentes on PVP servers during in Burning Crusade. Farming motes was bad enough without fucking around with each other. This particular set of are elite, tightly packed and respawn rather quickly. Jacking around with each other would mean insta-death and greifing each other back and forth wouldn't accomplish much.
I've been out of town on business this week. Guild members are looking after my property, farming my trees on my behalf. I'm looking forward to getting back home and relaxing in game for a few hours.
Although I consider myself done with the Alpha, I will be playing but a bit less. Recently promoted as a guild officer, I don't want to lose touch with the gang. Plus they're a real hoot in vent.
I was level 36 rolling around in level 20 armor until recently and I’m not alone. There are two contributing factors to the level and armor gap. Firstly, the primary source of obtaining gear is by completing quests. I won’t retrace what I already discussed in this post.
Not Much Questing
I haven’t been doing quests with any regularity and yet, I’m leveling just fine. My XP comes from harvesting, processing components, crafting specific trade goods and turning in trade packs. Those activities combined represents the bulk of my XP. I stopped questing with any intention around level 20. As a habit, I don’t like seeing much of the PVE content pre-release. In other MMOs, I would have hung up my account now until release but in AA there is so much else to do. However, having shelved doing quests left me in lower level gear.
My gear isn’t a problem when soloing mobs. My pet and I can handle multiple mobs 2 to 3 levels higher. I have to heal afterwards but I’m not close to being in jeopardy. Consequently, my gear hasn’t mattered to me. I’m out enjoying what I like about the game, not chasing rewards – that’s not my thing.
ROFL Stomp Avoidance
For the content I’m currently consuming, my gear only matters in one circumstance, open world PVP. I don’t do a lot of it but I enjoy going along when the guild embarks on an adventure. So far, I haven’t been stomped in PVP. In fact, my plate has allowed me to escape better than other lowbies tagging along. Even under direct and targeted attack, I’ve been able to survive until a guild member got the player off me or I made it to a neutral guard on my own steam.
Recently, we were assing around on an enemy dock after a successful turn in when enemy faction players showed up and engaged us. I had two people on me and was even lassoed back to my attackers, as the rest of the party sprinted to the guards.
People in voice chat were screaming “Run, Aly!” but I was slowed after being lassoed. “Oh no!” When they saw me unable to sprint. Luckily, I was able to heal myself and keep inching forward to safety. Too intent on their prey, me, my attackers didn’t notice they’d gotten to close to the guards. One of them was lassoed forward and killed with one shot. Muhahaha. Sweet.
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